arXiv:2610.29160v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: This paper explores the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enable end-to-end automotive design and software development for Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs). Based on our contributions within the Central Car Server (CeCaS) and follow-up EU-funded projects, we present an AI-driven toolchain integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) to automate the transformation of natural-language requirements into system architectures, executable software, and validation artifacts. The approach emphasizes traceability, consistency, and compliance with safety-critical automotive development requirements. Validation is performed on a centralized vehicle computing platform supporting adaptive cruise control and emergency braking, tested in Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) and Software-in-the-Loop (SiL) environments. We discuss current capabilities, practical limitations, and future directions toward increasingly automated, reliable, and quality-assured automotive software development with minimal human intervention.
Nenad Petrovic, Alois Knoll
arXiv:2610.29152v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: A generated chest radiograph can be useful as declared augmentation, but the same image becomes unsupported evidence when submitted as the record of a real examination. We study this problem by separating three questions: whether an image passes an automated quality check, whether an origin classifier flags it as generated, and whether a trusted record supports the claimed acquisition. In our experiments, Qwen selects up to 20 images from pools of 1,000 existing Cheff-identified or SynthCheX candidates. A receiver evaluates quality with MedGemma and predicted origin with a classifier on frozen DINOv3 features. Quality-based selection raises quality passes from 12 to 19 of 20 for Cheff-identified images and from 8 to 17 for SynthCheX. We find no evidence that selection improves passage through both checks: no selected Cheff-identified image passes both, while uniform, quality, and quality-constrained surrogate selection produce 2, 1, and 2 SynthCheX passes. On unprocessed test images, the origin classifier flags 4,677 of 5,000 SynthCheX images, but it also misclassify 110 of 2,297 NIH (real) images and 568 of 957 genuine images from another collection as fake. Our results further show that JPEG compression reduces SynthCheX-versus-NIH AUROC from 0.987 to 0.841. Even without processing, 152 SynthCheX images pass both pixel checks. These checks can filter submissions, but they cannot verify an acquisition claim. We strongly advocate that source and intended use must be recorded and checked separately for admission of chest radiographs in medical datasets.
Shaikh Akib Shahriyar, Zinedine Sehili, Adam Arthur, Christopher Schwartz
arXiv:2610.29150v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Timbre similarity is a key evaluation target for generative speech systems, including voice conversion, speaker-cloning text-to-speech, and zero-shot speech models. When the generated voice does not match the target speaker, the problem often reflects imperfect separation of speaker-related timbre from content, making it important to identify where timbre information resides and which representations still carry it. Using speaker identity as a measurable proxy, we probe frequency bands, phase/magnitude structure, WORLD source/filter decomposition, voiced/unvoiced regions, self-supervised learning (SSL) layers, EnCodec/HuBERT tokens, and a 45-listener test across Mandarin, English, and Japanese speech/singing data. Speaker information is distributed: 1--8 kHz magnitude and vocal-tract spectral-envelope structure dominate perception, above-8 kHz bands remain machine-discriminative, shallow SSL layers expose compact speaker information, and token leakage depends on tokenizer/layer choice. These findings indicate where generation systems should condition on or transform speaker information, and where content, codec, and token pipelines should audit residual speaker leakage.
Yiquan Zhou, Yixuan Wang, Xiaozhe Qi, Xin Gao, Shihao Li
arXiv:2610.29145v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models increasingly automate optimization modeling from natural language problems, producing written mathematics, solver code and a returned report. Verifying one optimization problem across these artifacts requires semantic comparison: unequal models can attain the same objective, equivalent models can use different auxiliary variables, and mutually consistent artifacts can omit the same source requirement. ORSMT provides a typed semantic interface and exact SMT relation queries. It aligns observable decisions, projects auxiliary variables, proves or refutes feasible region and objective relations, localizes refutations to implicated rows or domains and links source texts when available. It then reconstructs one artifact from another, and each adopted candidate passes the required relation checks. Across 3,034 problems and six generator sizes, ORSMT improves the model-code match rate in all 72 benchmark and generator combinations before selection. Protected selection raises the aggregate rate from 43.2% to 88.2% and the share that are both correct and matched from 25.2% to 40.2%. On the 1,905 refuted outputs, certified voting under the shared fallback makes 50.9% of outputs correct and matched, compared with 44.8% for ReLoop and 49.4% for Opt-Verifier. A separate one-round source revision followed by exact reconstruction restores a model-code match for 84.4% of the refuted pairs.
Rui Zhang, Chenyu Zhou, Jianghao Lin, Yaoxin Wu, Dongdong Ge, Wen Song
arXiv:2610.29140v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Engineering graduates in India enter a technology sector that is being reshaped by generative AI, yet the route into that sector runs through examinations and campus placement screens that largely exclude AI. Institutions in India have an approved intake of nearly 2.9 million seats in engineering and technology for 2026-2027, but HCI research on how students prepare for AI-mediated work has drawn mostly on Western and East Asian settings. We interviewed 23 students and recent graduates of Indian engineering and computing programmes about how they used generative AI across coursework, examinations and placements, and how they judged their own readiness for work. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we report five themes, covering AI-first workplaces and AI-free placement screens, how participants prepared for placement, how they used AI in coursework, the role of faculty authority and enforcement, and participants' concerns about their readiness for work. Drawing on signaling theory, we discuss what grades and screen scores certify once AI can help produce them, and we offer recommendations for employers, institutions and AI tool designers.
Samhitha Goutham, Ziwei Gu
arXiv:2610.29136v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Continuous diffusion language models generate a whole sequence in parallel, never drawing a single word at any intermediate step; only the final step turns embeddings into text. Models such as ELF now report autoregressive-level quality at a fraction of the sampling steps of discrete-token diffusion models, and this design principle -- no step-wise discretization -- is what their own ablations credit for the gain. We show that this same principle carries a hidden cost: a collapse of the lexical long tail. Measured against held-out human text, ELF's output matches the human rate on common words almost exactly, yet its rarest words appear at only 0.30x the human rate, a gap that does not close from 105M to 652M parameters and that no sampler setting these models expose can reach. A same-size GPT-2, in contrast, spans zero to above the human rate by its decoding rule alone. We trace the difference to what continuous diffusion models lack: with no step that ever draws a discrete word, every step is instead driven by an average over the candidates still in play, and averaging a rare candidate together with the common word competing for its slot lands on the common word. An autoregressive model avoids this because its decoding rule samples one candidate rather than averaging over all of them. We propose GRAFT, a training-free method that grafts this missing choice back onto a frozen model: while the model is still undecided, GRAFT commits the rare words the average would otherwise discard, then regenerates the sequence from scratch with those commitments held in place. Across three ELF scales and on LangFlow, an independent continuous dLLM, GRAFT restores the rare-word share of generated text from 0.42-0.77x the human rate to 0.82-1.10x, a relative gain of 34-109%, and moves the entire word-frequency profile closer to human on every model tested, by 2.7x on ELF-B and 12x on LangFlow.
arXiv:2610.29129v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reward hacking is a major problem in current production machine learning systems, resulting in costly and dangerous failures. Here we study how to monitor for and mitigate reward hacking in realistic settings, including tool calls and long contexts. We apply a dynamic intervention to steering directions obtained by three different methods: difference-in-means vectors from labeled rollouts, gradient optimization-based vectors, and vectors extracted when models reference an anti-reward-hacking model spec. This dynamic intervention perturbs model representations less than uniform steering vector addition to the residual stream, allowing for more precise edits. We find that we are able to cheaply and significantly reduce reward hacking without correspondingly significant costs to model coherence or capability, and that steering vectors originally extracted from coding environments also generalize to reducing reward hacking in other domains. Our results pave the way towards latent space monitoring and control over realistic production systems.
Austin Meek, Kyle Cox, Matthew Nguyen, Austin J. Brockmeier, Steven Basart
arXiv:2610.29120v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Deployed tourism trip planners ingest travel times and ratings as exact numbers, although routing services return travel times that vary with the hour of departure and a platform rating may rest on a handful of reviews or on tens of thousands. We present an eco-friendly trip planner that represents both quantities as Z-numbers, which pair a fuzzy restriction on a value with a fuzzy reliability on the evidence behind it, and that constructs them directly from routing-service observations at six departure hours and from platform review counts rather than from linguistic elicitation. A hybrid loss combines score, carbon, travel-time, and reliability terms, and an adaptive large neighborhood search returns single-day itineraries with per-leg reliability annotations through a conversational front end. We compare the planner with a crisp-mean baseline under an identical optimizer in Baku, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Tashkent, and Istanbul, with fifteen points of interest and thirty seeds per city, and we evaluate the selected itineraries on their trip carbon and their total travel time. Pooled over 150 seed-paired runs, the planner lowers trip carbon from 3.24 to 2.61 kg (19.3%, Wilcoxon p = 0.017; city-clustered bootstrap interval 6.4% to 26.7%) and travel time from 123 to 109 minutes per trip (11.5%, p = 2.8e-10; interval 5.0% to 18.2%). The travel-time reductions survive a Holm correction in Baku, Istanbul, and Abu Dhabi, the carbon reduction is significant in Baku and large but uncertain in the dispersed catalogs of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and neither metric changes in Tashkent. Review counts were measured for Baku and estimated for the other four cities, and the comparison involves a single baseline, so the results establish feasibility and direction rather than a general advantage. Code, routing caches, frozen routing tables, and per-seed results are openly released.
Aziz Nuriyev, Sherzod Turaev, Saja Al-Dabet, Mary John, Kanan Qasimzade, Alihuseyn Orujzada, Alihuseyn Orujzada, Aisha Al Ali
arXiv:2610.29101v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) communicate through short click sequences called codas, whose structure includes the rhythmic pattern of inter-click intervals (ICI) and the spectral composition of the clicks. In this paper, we propose the Dual-Channel Contrastive Encoder (DCCE), which explicitly encodes rhythm and spectral information with separate encoders before fusing them. We evaluate DCCE on three coda-understanding tasks: social unit, coda type, and individual identification. We compare DCCE against strong baselines from literature under a common linear-probe protocol and analyze the role of each channel and training objective through ablations. On 1,383 codas, shared partitions and validation-only layer selection support three random splits and three recording-date-disjoint folds. DCCE with unit pairing and type supervision achieves mean random-split macro-F1 of 0.901/0.865/0.597 for unit/type/identity. Raw ICI remains strongest for type (0.987), and ICI plus temporal mel statistics is a strong identity reference (0.724). An auxiliary identity objective improves spectral-branch identity prediction but does not improve the mean fused-identity score in this configuration. Date-grouped evaluation and four year holdouts expose generalization limits. The results support task-dependent combinations of timing and spectral information, without establishing independent biological channels or general architectural superiority. Code, notebooks, and complete results are available at https://dcce-research-site.vercel.app.
Jo\~ao Victor Quintanilha, Emma Virnelli, Shuo Zhang
arXiv:2610.29098v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: One-shot landmark localization in volume scans with varying fields of view (FOVs) is challenging. While existing self-supervised learning methods have shown promising performance, they rely on contrastive learning built upon augmented views of the same image, which inherently limits their generalization in cross-modality scenarios. This motivates research on cross-modality embedding learning using paired multi-modality images. However, existing methods suffer from not only limited training data, but also the requirement of multi-stage iterative training. To address these limitations, we propose UNIVERS, an end-to-end trainable framework that learns UNIversal Voxel-wise Embedding via Randomized Synthesis. Our framework leverages diverse pseudo-data synthesized from organ shape templates, with randomization applied to semantic layout, visual appearance, FOV, and spatial pose. Coupled with cross-domain discriminative voxel-wise contrastive learning, this domain randomization strategy forces the network to disregard domain-specific biases and learn features that are robust against variations in imaging contrast, resolution, and spatial context. Consequently, the trained model enables one-shot landmark localization in multi-modality volume scans with arbitrary FOVs. In this study, the efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated by applying it to the task of localizing the adrenal glands, which are paired, small, and irregular endocrine organs. In particular, comprehensive experiments are conducted on three challenging adrenal gland datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that UNIVERS consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) one-shot landmark localization approaches, with particularly prominent advantages in cross-modality scenarios. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Kendra9999/UNIVERS.
Derong Yu, Qingsong Zhao, Yanbing Yue, Yikai Li, Zhi Zhang, Guoyan Zheng
arXiv:2610.29093v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We introduce MixAgent, an agentic pipeline for music post-production that follows the workflow of audio engineers to build interpretable and editable mixing plans guided by a reference song. A grouping agent first routes related input tracks, such as drum recordings, into subgroups. A planning agent then uses retrieved examples to choose and order audio effects, such as volume control and reverb, for tracks, subgroups, and the full mix. To refine the mix, a detector identifies what needs correction, and a critic proposes numerical parameter adjustments from tracks to the full mix. In our experiments, prompting recent multimodal models to listen and revise often worsens the mix, making reliable correction a central challenge. We therefore build MixCritic, a dataset of 45,657 repair critiques derived from parameters fitted to professional mixes, and train the critic with supervised fine-tuning followed by preference optimization on rendered audio outcomes. On MedleyDB, learned refinement reduces error by 19% relative to the initial mix, with preference optimization reducing it by 8.4% over supervised training alone. Retrieved examples further improve effects selection, and a human listening test shows that MixAgent gets higher quality ratings than mixes produced by Qwen3-Omni, Gemini 3.8 Flash and GPT-4o-audio.
Jaywon Koo, Junghyun Koo, Marco A. Martinez-Ramirez, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Seungheon Doh, Qiyu Wu, Vicente Ordonez, Yuki Mitsufuji
arXiv:2610.29090v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Abdominal organ segmentation is essential in modern medical applications. While existing deep learning approaches demonstrate promising performance, their heavy reliance on large-scale image data raises concerns over generalization capability and privacy risks. This motivates the development of generalizable segmentation training paradigms based on domain-randomized image synthesis, facilitating generalization across unseen real image domains. However, existing paradigms either suffer from limited segmentation performance when applied to abdominal organs, or require dataset-specific finetuning. To address these limitations, we propose ReSeg, a novel two-stage retraining-free framework for domain-agnostic zero-shot abdominal organ segmentation. At the first stage, our organ-agnostic synthetic data-driven pretraining approach exploits semantically and visually diverse synthetic images generated by a dedicated data engine to optimize a Generalizable Semantic Representation Network (GSRNet). The network is thereby capable of learning semantic features robust against variations in anatomical structure, imaging contrast, resolution and spatial context, which provide universal representation capabilities that serve as a foundation for segmentation learning. Subsequently, in the second stage, we continue to train an Organ-specific Encoder-decoder Segmentation Network (OESNet), whose encoder is initialized with the pretrained weights. This training process is facilitated by another dedicated data engine, which generates diversified visual images while strictly retaining the inherent spatial layout of abdominal organs. Comprehensive evaluation on seven abdominal organ segmentation datasets across three different modalities including CT, MRI, and PET demonstrates that ReSeg consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods while eliminating the need for real training images.
arXiv:2610.29075v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We aim to address the problem of Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Mode Averaging, a critical problem that emerges when distilling Flow Matching (FM) based behavior policies in offline Reinforcement Learning (RL): When learning over multi-modal datasets, standard distillation inadvertently forces the policy to interpolate across different behavioral modes, causing the generated actions to collapse into invalid, OOD regions. To resolve this, we propose Value-Rectified Distillation (VRD), a novel framework that reformulates offline policy distillation as a value-guided generative trajectory alignment problem. By employing a dynamic coupling mechanism, VRD actively rectifies flow dynamics to explicitly decouple distinct behavioral modes, cleanly isolating high-value actions. Specifically, we instantiate VRD through two complementary algorithms: VRD-Q, which utilizes value-quantile behavior distillation to statistically filter out low-value behaviors, and VRD-R, which reorganizes the latent space to geometrically isolate high-value generative trajectories from the FM-based behavior policy. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that VRD improves existing generative baselines across diverse continuous control and planning tasks on the D4RL, OGBench, and Minari benchmarks, especially over those multi-modal, non-expert datasets.
Ke Jiang, Wen Jiang, Yoshinobu Kawahara, Xiaoyang Tan
arXiv:2610.29073v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: This paper proposes Role-Enhanced Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought (RE-ZS-CoT), a prompting framework that systematically integrates domain-specific expert roles to enhance reasoning in large language models (LLMs) without task-specific examples. We assess two versions of our approach. In the first version, static role selection, we evaluate eight predefined expert roles across arithmetic, commonsense, and reading comprehension benchmarks to determine their impact on reasoning performance. In the second version, dynamic role selection, each model autonomously selects the single most suitable role for each benchmark, enabling adaptive task-role alignment without manual specification. Across 20 LLMs and seven benchmarks, RE-ZS-CoT frequently surpasses zero-shot and zero-shot-CoT baselines, achieving performance improvements of up to 44 percentage points. The results reveal a strong correspondence between static and dynamic versions; the benchmarks where static roles yielded improvements were almost always those where dynamic roles also outperformed baselines, though static selection achieved peak performance. Ablation studies further show that unconventional roles degrade performance, underscoring the necessity of task-role alignment. The framework's scalability is validated across model sizes (2b-14b parameters), with smaller models like Granite3.3-8b achieving remarkable proficiency in arithmetic reasoning. RE-ZS-CoT advances zero-shot prompting by unifying role specialization with chain-of-thought reasoning, offering a practical, resource-efficient solution for improving LLM capabilities across diverse domains.
Ibrahim Khan, Thai Van Nguyen, Yi Xia, Pratch Suntichaikul, Mustafa Can Gursesli, Daniel Fernandez Galeote, Juho Hamari, Ruck Thawonmas
arXiv:2610.29063v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Time series anomalies take diverse forms, and individual detectors encode different anomaly scoring principles that rarely cover all anomaly types. Recent unsupervised time-series anomaly detectors provide complementary scoring signals, yet deploying them as an ensemble preserves the inference and maintenance cost of every individual detector. We study whether heterogeneous teacher detectors can be distilled into a single lightweight detector in the unsupervised setting, where no anomaly labels are available to define a shared target. AnoMix addresses this by extracting weak pairwise supervision from the training-set anomaly scores of frozen teachers. It normalizes each teacher score sequence independently and trains the student with CoRank, a multi-teacher ranking-distillation objective that converts teacher score gaps into pairwise supervision through teacher consensus. Across seven benchmark datasets, AnoMix successfully integrates complementary teacher scoring principles into a single deployable model, improving over individual detectors and static score ensembles while using a compact student with under 80k parameters on the benchmark settings. A zero-shot variant further shows that the distilled ranking signal transfers to unseen datasets and can outperform large pretrained time-series foundation models for anomaly detection.
Dongchan Cho, Jiho Han, Juwon Hwang, Changhee Min, Minsang Kim, Namsoon Jung
arXiv:2610.29052v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: A typed decision maps evidence, a question and a fixed set of options to a probability for every option, computed in one forward pass, by reading a language model's logits or a small head over its hidden states, instead of generating and parsing text. The commercial system Jev popularised this System~1 interface, and open reproductions have followed. We report two uses of the pattern. \emph{Part I} describes an in-house System~1 judge that triages about 148K agentic coding session records for a training corpus. It replaces a frontier LLM judge that cost on the order of \$1,000 per pass and whose stored labels matched a fresh two-judge consensus on only 26.9\% of the sessions where the two judges agreed; a self-hosted frozen backbone with a rank-16 LoRA adapter and a pointer head answers three typed questions in one forward pass, judges 1,000 sessions in about three minutes of one GPU, about \$0.06 at a reference rate and roughly 1\% of the frontier judge's cost, and keeps every session inside the organisation. \emph{Part II} asks whether a readout that adds no parameters can be competitive and whether training one helps. Applying the public Eikos recipe and corpus of about 25K decisions to three further backbones (1B, 2B and 35B), we read the frozen output layer of a LoRA-adapted decoder. On the 111 public hard items of JevBench our single-seed 35B, developed with those items in view, scores 79.3\%, not significantly different from the commercial reference (73.0\%, unadjusted $p=0.12$) and ahead of five open systems after Holm--Bonferroni correction; our 2B is ahead of all four kev checkpoints on the leaderboard. A single-seed ablation finds no detectable benefit from training the 26 letter rows of the output layer, and a retrain on a later corpus release moves the 2B's hard-tier accuracy by 11.7 points, which shows how little small evaluations resolve.
Yuchuan Weng, Chi Liu, Xin Chen, Srinivasan Manoharan
arXiv:2610.29045v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We introduce HumanCentric-Scenes-AI, a human-curated dataset of 296 AI-generated stimuli that depict people across four contexts in which people encounter AI-generated media. The Surveillance subset contains 85 AI-generated CCTV-style images. The Occupations subset contains 128 AI-generated occupational portraits in a balanced paired design covering 64 occupations with one female and one male version of each. The AI-edited subset contains 27 real photographs in which a region was altered or replaced by a generative model. The Video subset contains 56 AI-generated short videos. We curated the images and videos manually over multiple rounds to make them as photorealistic as possible. For each stimulus we release the file, the generation prompt where recorded, and per-stimulus metadata. We report depicted-gender distributions from an initial set of 134 generations without a specified gender and compare them with U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational gender shares. We report edit-region size and its association with zero-shot detection difficulty for the AI-edited subset. We report image-quality distributions for the Surveillance subset and subject-category coverage for the Video subset. HumanCentric-Scenes-AI is intended first for human-perception research, and also for calibration of AI-detection classifiers and bias analysis of generative models.
Nima Kamali, Sana Nasiri, Negar Kamali
arXiv:2610.29030v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Currently, dexterous humanoid robot hands are widely considered the final hardware bottleneck that hampers generalist robots from physically assisting people at home and work. As conventional tendon-driven designs suffer from high cost, demanding maintenance, poor reliability, and short durability, alternative linkage-driven designs have increasingly gained attention. Despite their potential to avoid the weaknesses of tendon-driven hands, integrating multiple degrees of actuation (DOA) in a single digit with linkage drivetrains is a challenge for design and fabrication. Only a few studies have managed to present functional humanoid hands that are completely linkage-driven and have at least three DOAs per digit without compromising actuator placement and other design preferences. Our work introduces a new linkage-driven hand featuring a unique flexure hinge. Together with elastic drive rods made of spring steel, the linkage drivetrains are significantly simplified. Unlike other linkage-driven designs of similar dexterity, our design does not require many miniature moving parts. As a result, the hand can be fabricated easily with a budget 3D printer. This not only significantly lowers the barrier to entry for using and developing dexterous humanoid robot hand functions, but also allows the hands to be sized much closer to regular human hands. The design offers desirable kinematic advantages as well. A prototype is evaluated for grasping and object manipulation. In addition, this paper presents our latest findings on kinematics and control of the hand.
Neel Adwani, Muhaiminul Islam Akash, Saffia Ouali, Ethan Liu, Cong Wang
arXiv:2610.29008v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: In recent years, automated fruit classification systems have become a more critical component in precision agriculture for efficient yield estimation, quality control, and supply chain optimization. However, they still face significant challenges under varying quality, fruit maturity, illumination, texture degradation, morphological attributes, domain shift, and post-harvest handling conditions. In this study, we address the challenging issue of cross-grade banana variety classification. This is a real-world setting where models that have been trained on specific quality grades must generalize to unseen grades to handle significant domain shift. Under a rigorous Leave-One-Grade-Out evaluation protocol, we present a thorough comparative analysis of CNNs, ViTs, and dual-stream hybrid architectures using a large-scale dataset of 31,678 banana images with three varieties and three quality grades. Specifically, to address the drawbacks of single-paradigm frameworks, we present a dual-stream Swin ResNet hybrid framework enhanced with KL-divergence-based self-distillation to align probabilistic feature representations across the CNN and Transformer streams. Comprehensive experimental analyzes show that the presented hybrid framework with KL-divergence based self-distillation achieves better overall performance, i.e., it attains a mean accuracy of 81.25% and significantly surpasses CNN and Transformer baseline models. Qualitative analysis further confirms that the hybrid framework in this study improves discriminative feature transferability, improves attention localization, and stabilizes optimization.
Khush Kataruka, Mohammad Muzammila, Zahid Akhtar, Raghavendra Ramachandra, Praveen Kumar Chandaliya
arXiv:2610.29005v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: A central obstacle to self-improving agents is the absence of a reliable fitness signal for realistic stateful tasks. We introduce \textsc{VeriEvolve}, an evaluator-first evolution framework that constructs this missing evaluation layer before optimizing the agent. From task instruction, VeriEvolve synthesizes instruction-grounded challenge states and an executable evaluator that checks them. During each round of workflow evolution, the evaluator is frozen and serves as the fitness signal. Between rounds, VeriEvolve revises the evaluator by converting the end states of strong and weak runs into a pair of counterfactual test cases.
Across all 30 MCPMark Filesystem tasks, VeriEvolve constructs 30 evaluators with 141 challenge states, achieving 141/141 agreement on the generated suites and 113/122 agreement on held-out states produced by executor agents. Evaluator-guided evolution increases externally verified success from 6/30 to 18/30 for GLM-5.2 and from 27/30 to 30/30 for Claude; refinement removes all three false positives that the weak executor exposes. Cross-environment studies on PostgreSQL, Playwright, Notion, and GitHub further expose complementary limits from observability, state representation, and search/execution capacity. These results show that executable evaluators can be synthesized and used to guide search when task success is observable and an external verifier is available for calibration.
Yueshen Li, Kamer Ali Yuksel, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur, Jo\~ao Pedro Maia